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My career overview

highlights
  • Gold medals in the official National Programming Competition in both China and Singapore
  • Learning and building tech solutions has been my main focus since 2004, including 7+ years of fulltime coding

Early career​

I first got to know computers after my father bought a Windows 95 machine to play games and I have fallen love with technology ever since. Like many others, I started with shooting games, typing games, floppy disks and game cheats. Eventually I started to learn some DOS-OS programming to facilitate everyday usage.

As I was going to secondary school, I quickly realized I hate all the homework and exams in China. There happened to be a new policy that anyone who wins the gold medal in the nationaly programming competition can skip school and go straight to the best univerisities in China. So I started learning BASIC, PASCAL, C++ etc. with the encouragement of my parents. In Grade 7, the dream came true. I indeed won the national programming gold medal and met many tech gurus in events hosted by the Ministry of Education. I liked the respect and appreciations I had when I presented new algorithm ideas to professors, lead competition teams, and designed coding contest problems.

The Internet boom allowed me to self-study a variety of things and to explore the world online. That curiosity eventually lead me to Singapore, where I won the programming champion in the official programming competition as well.

Mid career​

I chose Canada to complete my university degree because I wanted to immigrate easily. During my time in Canada, I devoted my efforts towards Artifical Intelligence while continued to build 50+ websites/apps for various purposes and consulted with many more. I was so passionate about Apps that I ran workshops teaching schoolmates how to make them.

Although efforts to build a startup or get a senior developer position in Canada have all failed, I have polished my industrial experience considerably. I managed projects, designed user experiences, analyzed data, worked on testing, backend and frontend.

My most memorable tech experience at my job:

  • TXIO: configuring complex messaging queues to facilitate large volume of data
  • Research assistant: applying machine learning for real
  • Proofpoint: installing server blades in a hot server room
  • Citi: debugging 200+ lines of ancient SQL code
  • Veeva: gets FDA approval
  • DIY.clothing: demo products shipped to my home for the 1st time
  • Google: navigating the marvelous DevOps infrastructure

Notable points​

  • I would inspect the code of virtually every website I go to and analyze the following

    • UX design
    • tracking and anti-tracking
    • adblocking and anti-adblocking

  • I have built my own information consumption pipeline with the following components

    • web scraping and automation (simulated hand shaking to evade bot detection)
    • webpage to web feed converter
    • custom search engine
    • web feed reader

  • I find or build tech solutions that makes my life easier all the time (e.g. simple text formattor: https://text.deep.institute/)